Thomas Hardy

“The Return of the Native is a great, super melodramatic Thomas Hardy novel. His earlier novels were criticized for being either too boring or too sensational, and he tried to strike a happy medium with this one. He wrote a five-act tragedy about a tiny village in England and submitted it to various publishers, most of whom rejected it…He ends up placing the novel at Belgravia, which is a middle-brow magazine. They won’t publish a tragedy, so they make him add a sixth act that ends happily. A little bonus is that in any contemporary edition you’ll find, at the end of the fifth act, Hardy notes that there are two possible endings for the book, and that ‘those with an austere artistic code can assume the more consistent conclusion to be the true one.’ This might be paraphrased as ‘this book should be sad.’ It’s a classic Hardy novel, full of landscape and striving people and romance, and it’s really beautiful.” Read more...

The Best Illustrated Novels

Rosalind Parry, Literary Scholar

“Jude the Obscure is about a poor young man, a country boy, who is inspired by the example of his village teacher to commit himself to studying so that he can go to Christminster (which is transparently Oxford). For various reasons, he fails, and makes a series of disastrous decisions, and he is rejected in any event for reasons beyond his control and he dies. The epigraph is all about Christianity and the divorce laws and about the self-destructive possibilities in literary ambition itself. Jude wants to study, and he immerses himself in the Classics and so on, and, in the end, it’s that ambition that does for him. So it’s a curiously self-cancelling work in that way.” Read more...

The best books on Censorship

Anthony Julius, Lawyer

“It’s very much about trying to find a place of happiness for yourself in a world full of obstacles, in a terrible maze of social change and convention at the end of the industrial revolution.” Read more...

The best books on Coming of Age

Meg Rosoff, Children's Author